How many more roadblocks can these companies throw between them and their customers' money?

Back in the 90s, a friend was the engineer at Amazon who built One Click Ordering. It was a pretty nice time-saving innovation (though in no way deserving of patent protection). He tells me that internally they referred to it as "The Money Vacuum", and joked about the day, soon, when all US currency would be replaced with Amazon gift certificates.

So if you're buying a physical object from Amazon, and you're already logged in, here's how that works, even today:

Click "Buy".

No complaints there.

Oh, but if you want to buy a digital album, a whopping 100 MB spread across 10 files? Here's how that goes:

Over on the right where it used to say "Buy", now it says "Go Unlimited". I imagine some people find that self-explanatory, but I don't know what it means and I don't care. Click the small text link at the bottom that says "More options".

A new dialog box replaces it: Click the button that says "Download your music now".

Another dialog box! On this one, ignore the buttons and click the microscopic text at the bottom that says "No thanks, just download music files directly".

Dialog box number four! "Your download will start automatically -- please sit here and stare at this screen for another artificial 10 second delay."

BONUS ROUND!

Except that 30% of the time it will instead say, "There was a problem with your download." When that happens: Aimlessly wander around the screen for a while until you can figure out how to get into the music archive thingy. Maybe it's under "Departments → Amazon Music → Amazon Music Unlimited"? Nope, that's not it, that's an ad.

Maybe their page design is optimized according to metrics instead of smug UX experts?
For example, it might turn out that they sell more stuff to people who get distracted by impulse purchases on their way to clicking the search box, or maybe it's worth it long term to show people ads for the Amazon ecosystem before they buy the thing they came there for.
Or, maybe you know how to sell stuff better than Amazon does.

The problem with most conspiracy theorists, I'm talking about the "moon landing was faked" kind of people, is that their world-view requires belief in massive organizational competence: Their model assumes that someone who is very smart and has a plan is not only in control, but is able to mobilize thousands of other people, who are also competent, and are all inexplicably capable of keeping a secret.

This flies in the face of everything we know about large organizations. It's an essentially religious belief. It's the hope and fear that there is an Invisible Sky Daddy.

I think of these "moon landing was faked" people every time someone issues an apologetic like yours for the observably shitty behavior of some corporation, whether that shitty behavior is as small as a terrible user interface, or as large as repulsive business practices or some other tragedy of the commons.

Point out some company doing something awful, and without fail, somebody will show up and say, "Well they make a lot of money, so I assume that whatever it is that they are doing, they have a good reason for it."

You know what is even more likely? That they made a lot of money, and they don't know what they're doing. You can be rich and also incompetent.

Partly, but I think that it, and the Sky Daddy feelings, are essentially a hope that somehow everything is under control.

If the world is terrible, but that's because it's due to the nefarious plans of super-villains, then there's hope that we can find the super-villains and stop them, and put better plans in place. If the world seems terrible, but that's because it's due to the unfathomable plan of an ineffable Sky Daddy who actually has our best interests at heart, then there's hope that it will all work out in the end.

However, if the world is terrible because things are chaotic and uncontrollable and there's no master plan that guarantees it'll all work out in the end, that's what's terrifying.

Some people want everything to be under control, even if that control is brutal and malevolent, because they find the alternative even scarier.

There was an article published last year about roanoke truthers that had a phrase that captured it so well for me, "conspiracy theorists are the last believers in an ordered universe":

"“Conspiracy theorists are, I submit, some of the last believers in an ordered universe,” Pitzer College philosophy professor Brian Keeley wrote in Of Conspiracy Theories. “By supposing that current events are under the control of nefarious agents, conspiracy theories entail that such events are capable of being controlled.”
In other words, if nothing’s an accident and there are no lone wolf attacks or gunfights over petty grievances, then there is no gun problem. There is no mental health problem, either. For those who believe in crisis class theory, there are just big, theatrical attacks put on by the real problem: whoever is in charge."

The rest of the article's really depressing so I won't post the link to imply that people should read it, but you can easily google it if you're interested. The bit that struck me though was the perfect explanation of why certain minds are so comforted by conspiratorial style thinking. I hadn't quite understood it that way before this article. Now somebody else will have to write a good article about just what it is that makes me feel like such a smug asshole when I read things like that.

This question boils down to the extent to which customer satisfaction (specifically, the value placed on the customer's time) is considered superior to corporate profits. I am willing to forgive Amazon because Bezos didn't Murdochize WaPo and is building a billion dollars worth of rocket companies per year.

No, this question boils down to the extent to which jwz pointing out "this thing is bullshit" has a positive effect on the world by reducing that bullshit thing.

Also, why do people--people not looking at corporate profit sheets--keep going back to their fantasies of what other people told them about corporate profits? Improving UI is independent of corporate profits. Much of his complaint above is about the clicks which are superfluous: clicking each track individually instead of selecting the whole album, clicking "Get Started!", all the extra clicks because he had to see "There was a problem with your download."

It started with obidos.exe, a huge many-megabyte c++ cgi. Then I heard they reimplemented in perl. I'd guess an audiobook project got rodeo'd into service for music digital non-shipping assets.
Go see a medieval castle that's had many additions, extensions, towers and wings added, during/after wars, cannon, treason etc for make glorious comprehension for greatest america

You're forgetting that, back in the 90s, if you were using the internet, it meant you'd passed a mild but critical intelligence test and you could be trusted to understand what you were doing as you bought something online, let alone and intangible item like downloadable music. If my granny bought music online and somehow managed to save it to her local filesystem, it's vanished into thin air and they tried to cheat her!

I probably chose the wrong word – sorry, I'm no native speaker. Think of "argument" as "making a point" or so. Of course there was no argument in your post. Your were offending without anything valueable backing that up.

Indeed. But, it seems to me, offense is in the eye of the beholder. Me, as an old man, I found mspong's post really ridiculously annoying, indeed potentially offensive to old people, with its casual assumption of superiority, its half-witted assertions about what happened "back in the 90s". And, "if you were using the internet, it meant you'd passed a mild but critical intelligence test and you could be trusted to understand what you were doing as you bought something online". Give me a fucking break! The kids these days!!

This endless hoop jumping in order to just fucking download the file I just bought to is one of several reasons why I avoid Amazon's store and buy my ebooks on Kobo, which appears to be the only North American ebook store that continues to support a simple and straightforward "download the books you bought" page on their site.

It's also why, given the choice, I buy a physical CD over a digital MP3 download. Because I'd rather wait the extra week and then be able to painlessly add the music directly to itunes than go through all the hoop jumping to just download some songs.

Yes, but it's not hidden, and it doesn't require you to download an app to dl the book. Which makes it somewhat more user friendly for those who want to own their digital purchases than the amazon or nook stores.

My experience with Kindle ebooks is that it very easy for me to purchase a new ebook using the Android Kindle app. One click to purchase, and another to download. When I used to buy MP3 albums from them, only once did I have to buy the tracks individually as jwz described.

Perhaps the experience in iOS is different because Amazon is avoiding the 30% Apple tax?

If you don't mind not having an archive of your books that you control, then sure, you can buy books in the app on your reading device. I prefer the old school method of having our library in a folder on a hard drive, synched to dropbox so it's a few taps away on any of our devices.

Ironically buying books for my Kindle is a one-click process. Go to book page, note that "send to Elusis' Kindle" is still the default as it should be (instead of my phone, my iPad, my partner's Kindle, etc.), click "Buy." Start reading book on my Kindle before I even get the "thank you for your purchase" email.

(jwz, I'm so glad it isn't just me who's driven batshit by trying to actually GET THE MUSIC FILES I JUST PAID FOR at Amazon.)

Oh, that's so good, thanks for the memories! I really need to watch that hour long pilot again, the two thugs with their van were my favorite characters, out for a clumsy murder and reciting shakespeare:

'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.

this has all been highly entertaining. what the world needs now is a macro (who the fuck remembers what a macro is? not me.) which plays a very quiet "fuck.", or "fuck!fuck!fuck!", on each mouse click while browsing within https://amazon.com

"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"

This comment thread is one of the higher ranking 'herp derp' checkbox threads I've seen in a long time.

Maybe it was a fever dream, but I feel like I ignored the iOS upgrade nag for long enough this past week where it just went ahead and installed itself.

Can we talk about Apple's implementation of two-factor authentication that repeatedly asks for a code that it doesn't send to my phone, but displays on the same web page I'm logging into, and I can, you know, just memorize it for 3 seconds and type it in? Is that doing anything useful?

I have a hazy memory of buying music off of cdbaby.com (it seems like more than a decade ago) and it being
1. Put in credit card number
2. Receive mp3s

I can barely fathom the shit show that is online music purchases now. Everyone seems dead set on making you put your music on their platform, wherever (or whatever) the hell that is. Just give me the files, assholes.

Yeah, Amazon used to let you download a ZIP file full of MP3s, but they recently removed that ability. I find I have to run the Amazon Music app on my Windows PC, search for the album I just bought, then drag it to the "drag here to download".

Then, of course, you want to scrub the identification comments out of the MP3 metadata so Amazon can't chide you if any of those files escape into the wild.

No, this is exactly backwards. It used to be that you had to install the "Amazon Music Downloader" application (which was actually a browser plugin) in order to download anything at all, but these days they just feed you a zip if you jump through the hoops I described. Even the "multi-select and click download" dance above results in a zip file of MP3s being delivered eventually.

Is that so? I might actually start using it! I bought some music there when they started selling MP3s and I was so disappointed when a weird proprietary thing showed up and wanted to install software that I never used it again.